I woke this morning, drew back the curtains of my living room and peered through the window to catch a glimpse of the first rays of sunlight on a new day after dawn …. And instead of bright sunshine, I was saddened to behold a sight that seemed to me grim, darkening clouds signalling grave and ill portent to come.
Take a look at the photo and video-clip posted herewith…
My window overlooks the driveway and parking space in my neighbour’s apartments. At the end of the driveway is a cramped one-room servants’ quarter. That’s the home of the Nepali watchman who serves my neighbours house as its factotum — security, gardener, janitor, errand-boy, gate-keeper and much more.
The watchman has one little son … aged about 7 , I should guess. The boy can be seen in the pic and video-clip.
The watchman on his modest wage still manages to send his son to a nearby neighbourhood school. The boy is known to be a bright intelligent child, very eager to go to school. I’ve heard he scores well in classes as a diligent student.
In the last one year and half, the pandemic has turned the little boy’s world upside down … very rudely. His school closed and classes were disrupted for prolonged periods , months on end … The boy — and his parents — I’ve watched them both, now and then, struggling to remain and stay focused on school-work and curriculum… In the frequent disruptions caused by lockdowns, quarantines and the pressures to abide by the new ethics of Covid-compliant “appropriate behaviour” that has now become part of daily life, the poor student just can’t find the strong and consistent focus that is needed in any learning environment.
In my own school days, I remember, if I remained absent from school for a few days, it seemed everyone suspected me of playing truant from classes … Today, for millions of school-children in the country like this little boy next door to me, the pandemic has indeed turned truancy into the acceptable status of schools’ “new normal”…
As you can see in the photo and video, the little boy sits on a mat on the floor of the parking lot hemmed in by the parked vehicles of his master’s household. Under the trees with the languid pet-dog of the house limbering by lugubriously … and birds and bees of the garden cooing and humming over him , the boy follows the online lessons that his school teacher is blaring away on a tiny smart-phone screen propped up in front of him by his mother; letters, words, diagrams and tables blink out from a screen before his eyes with the teacher’s voice-over streaming across the air from the other side of an online classroom that has no location, is anonymous and nondescript… !
The boy as you can see is seated cross-legged, note and text book cradled on his lap … trying his best to listen attentively to the online lessons being dished out to him … He does look sharp and quite happy … and so does his mother seated behind the smart phone patiently overseeing her little son’s classroom session conducted on the spectrum airwaves of this country … But he looks a bit disoriented too, doesn’t he?
This is verily the new education model in brave new India today playing out in full, glorious display right before my eyes outside the window of my home …
It is nothing like what I myself experienced in my school years … and nothing ever like what in my wildest imagination I could ever have pictured, say fifty years ago, would be little school children in my country receiving formal primary education in this fashion.
When I was a school boy, education meant not just classroom curriculum. It meant much more… it meant learning to look upon education as an institution, a tradition and cherished value in life . It meant discipline — waking up in the morning, getting dressed in uniform and rushing to school before the bell rung . It meant looking upon the class teacher to be venerated as a person — not as a robot-like zombie droning out lessons from a flickering LED-lit smartphone screen. It meant spacious classrooms with neatly placed desks, a shining black-board and smelling of chalk and crisp pages of a brand new students-notebook. It meant running out onto the school playground when the bell rang out close of school and scampering and whooping about there all evening, engaged in games and gambol… It meant returning home at dusk, clothes all grimy with dry sweat and soiled with dust … showering and then , after supper, snuggling into a warm bed happy in the thought that yet another day in the gleeful life of a schoolboy had passed by as pure blessing …
When I was a school boy, Mohamed had to go all the way to the Mountain … not the other way around as it is today. I actually looked forward to walking to school to immerse myself in the classroom experience … Now it is the classroom image which streams itself via a smartphone screen into homes … or parking-lot spaces … and degrades the value of education into the make-believe world of onscreen virtuality.
Illam Thedi Kalvi Apply Online …! மக்களுக்கு வீடு தேடி வரும் இலவச கல்வித் திட்டம்… is the new-fangled model of post-pandemic education in my country! It is being touted and hailed as a “good initiative started by Tamilnadu Government in which education will be reached on student doorstep” …
The Covid pandemic of the last two years has indeed inflicted many painful disruptions and adversities on ordinary human living across the world , but in India, in no other sphere of social activity other than in School Education has it caused the most severe and likely very lasting damage.
Does it portend well for this generation of our children and grandchildren? I wonder.
The education of a child in the age-old Indian tradition has always had its pivot in the ancient concept of “guru kulam” or “guru kula vaasa” where the child grows and blossoms forth into youthful manhood or womanhood under the close personal tutelage of the teacher or guru . Without the intimacy of relationship with his or her guru no student could consider education as really complete or fulfilled in the best sense of the word.
When I look at the little boy next door again through the window of my house … poor child… seated in front of a smart-mobile phone screen and trying to learn lessons from a digital image of a class-teacher going through the robotic motions of mechanically imparting online lessons …. I can’t help feeling pity for the child … The “new normal” model of education might perhaps endow the child with modern 21st-century digital literacy and skills at a very precociously young age … But is that all real Education all about … just being able to learn the 3Rs, know how to be keyboard-adept and App-Knowledgeable in life ?
What is education without a guru , without kula and without vaasam …. I.e. without a teacher (in flesh and blood), a long continuing tradition of learning … and very importantly, a sacred place specially designated for learning?
Sudarshan Madabushi